Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction and Show Overview
Susan: Hi everyone. It's amazing. But I've been producing and hosting this show since 2015, and each month I produce a show on a topic related to fruit trees, food forests, permaculture, and arboriculture. And over the years I've gotten to know some of my listeners.
You guys are amazing. Lots of you are home growers. Some are small scale orchardists or homesteaders. Many are arborists, professional gardeners, landscapers, and permaculture experts, and all of you are passionate about creating and maintaining landscapes that are both beautiful, environmental, and fruitful.
[00:00:42] Meet the Guest: Matt Lebon
Susan: So I think you're gonna be excited to meet my guest on the show today. Matt Lebon from St. Louis, Missouri, does what many passionate gardeners dream of doing for a living. His job is to create productive and beautiful gardens for his clients. This is a career he calls foodscaping, and in the show today we'll talk about how he started foodscaping, how he encourages others to embrace this career path as well.
And near the end of the show, Matt will also highlight some of his favorite easy care foodscaping plants that you might wanna try in your garden.
/ So Matt, welcome to the show today.
Matt: Thanks, Susan. So glad to be here.
Susan: It is so fun to have you here. And I would love to start with the big question.
[00:01:33] Understanding Perennial Foodscaping
Susan: What would you say is perennial foodscaping?
How do you describe it?
Matt: I would describe it as the profession of designing, installing and maintaining edible landscapes for clients for a living.
Susan: And is this kind of a new career that didn't exist a few years ago?
Matt: I'm not the authority on that, but I would say it certainly from where I'm sitting, seemed to be virtually non-existent 10 years ago.
And it has been slowly growing for the last decade. to the point where now, most major cities have at least one foodscaping company, but some cities have many at this point.
Susan: So where do you think the interest comes from? Who is it that's drawn to putting in these landscapes? I think it's
Matt: everybody who's interested in connecting with food and connecting with the great outdoors, and more specifically, people who are interested in their children connecting with those things because so often I feel like my generation feels they missed the boat on that a little bit and they're like, oh, I actually didn't have this super grounded, connected-to-the-to-nature childhood. And right now the trend is so technological-based and screen-based. And I think parents are really motivated to create an alternative narrative for their children and give them an incentive to be outside.
And I think gardening, all the associated gardening tasks are a really idyllic way for the family to get outside and spend time together that doesn't feel like they have to pack up the car and go on a hike at someplace that's not right outside their door.
Susan: So that's interesting.
[00:03:31] Challenges and Opportunities in Foodscaping
Susan: So you'll have clients who are families, they live in their home, they're transforming their backyard.
Are there other projects that are larger scale or for different types of clients?
Matt: Yeah, I will. I will say a lot of times we do work in front yards too, so it's not just backyards and we really love the front yard work because it's so much more of a conversation piece and a real disruptor to the HOA ethic that is deleterious to our ethos of trying to change the planet here.
I would say, now I'm forgetting your questions, Susan. Oh.
Susan: So the question, first of all, I have to ask, what is an HOA ethic? Oh my gosh. Oh,
Matt: that's a great question. HOAs are homeowners associations, and they're the people, they're the neighborhood associations that govern what you can do with your yard.
And so many neighborhoods in the US have an HOA that says, you can't have a garden, you can't have a fence, you can't get rid of your grass, you can't plant flowers. And all of these things that infringe on our ability to just provide for ourself and provide beauty.
Susan: Wow. that's very interesting. In my city you've got a little of the, where the city will say, if you leave your garden overgrown in the front, we're gonna come, we're gonna cut it down.
But I didn't realize that there are some communities where they dictate that you have to keep your grass.
Matt: Oh, yeah. It's so common. All kinds of municipalities are citing people who have front yard gardens and foodscapes. It's a, seems to be a constant thing and my social media feed is the fight against this.
Susan: Wow. We've got an email here from Barbara and Barbara writes a big hello, really looking forward to all I can learn here. That's from Barb from Western Washington State. Thank you, Barb. So we were talking about other types of foodscaping projects. Yeah.
[00:05:32] Foodscaping for Restaurants and Community Projects
Susan: I know that you mentioned one that fascinated me working for, like doing a restaurant's, foodscape.
Tell me about that.
Matt: We've worked with several restaurants at this point, and they're really the ideal client because obviously they're serving food every day and they want unique, fresh ingredients that oftentimes they can't get from the supply chain. Even a lot of times local farms can't produce some of the really interesting edible flowers or just really fresh herbs or funky fruits that are really, not storable and packageable, for example.
We love the Gerardi Dwarf mulberry. /It's a mulberry that stays under eight feet tall and it's really a nice looking shrub. if you are a restaurant that wants mulberries on the menu, how are you gonna source them? It's really hard because they're so perishable and / just unpacking them and bringing them somewhere, / it might be too much and they might be damaged. So we focus a lot of our restaurant plantings on funky and interesting things that you can't get otherwise.
Susan: What a great idea. 'cause I can just imagine it could be with those berries, you just need a few on a dessert tray and people will say what is that?
Maybe it's on some creamy cake or something. And just a few makes that big difference.
Matt: Exactly.
Susan: Wow.
[00:07:06] Listener Emails and Feedback
Susan: we have an email here from Debbie. hello, Susan and Matt, happy holidays. Thank you, Debbie. Happy holidays to you. My name is Debbie Igar in the Rocky Mountain West at 7,600 feet. Thank you for a great program.
And warm wishes from Debbie. Yay. Happy holiday.
Okay, we've got the restaurant situation. You also mentioned to me a project you did once with the YMCA. Tell me about the challenges there. /
Matt: So we've done several YMCA projects and that has been so rewarding to work with community groups where a lot of people are getting exposure as opposed to just people's yards, where usually it's just one family.
Our main project was at a Wildwood YMCA, where it was a edible sensory garden, if you will. And it was around a big, if you picture like a big basketball court, where they had like a yoga tent and other kids' activities. And then in the periphery of it, it was really compacted rocky infill, almost undiggable / soil.
And so we created this sensory garden where you can walk around the entirety of that basketball type court. And there's all these different stations along the way with signage that greet you and invite you into smell things, eat things. So there's interesting things like five different colors of raspberries, just for different colors.
There's a sound area with different tall grasses and our native Baptisia, which has incredible pods that make sound like a rattlesnake if you shake them. We have purple asparagus for a lot of people have never seen purple asparagus. And we have interesting things like espalier fruit trees as well as a edible shoots garden in the shade.
So it's like a 30 foot bed that's along a shady area where it's all kind of uncommon shoot vegetables, like a hosta would be an example that people might be already familiar with, where it's in the shade and when it comes up in the spring, it is an edible shoot. So it's just like a whole myriad of experiences and it's got lots of benches.
It's got a few, what we call bus stops, which / basically / just looks like a bus stop, but there's grapes growing up over it so that people can sit, and / there's no bus that comes by, of course. It's just a stop along the way as you walk this area.
Susan: Wow, that sounds, I love that idea of a walking experience. It gives me ideas for our orchard park. It's wow. We could do something like that too.
We have an email here from Dawn. Dawn says, hi, Susan. Hi Matt. She says, already signed up for the Foodscaper Summit. Excited to listen live today. Nice. So Dawn is from Waterford, Michigan. Oh, great. So that's great.
Good, good. Dawn, I'm so pleased you're going. Oh, we've got another one here from Frank. Hello, Susan. What a topic today. Very, interesting. I'm from Boulder, Colorado. Happy New year to all of you. Thank you very much, Frank.
[00:10:34] Starting and Growing a Foodscaping Business
Susan: Okay, so here you are creating these foodscapes for a living. How did you learn how to do that?
Matt: Yeah, I, like all the people in this field took a circuitous route. I basically got really into permaculture and perennial foods and about 15 years ago, and then just, I feel like I got bit by the bug, because it's just been my life's passion and obsession ever since.
And basically learned these skills like just little by little, taking every permaculture course and workshop I could over the years. And then eventually started working on small scale organic vegetable farms and did a few different apprenticeships. And eventually I found my way into two experiences that were really formative.
One was managing the organic farm school here in town. It's a 14 acre farm school and it's in just in the St. Louis suburbs. And that was a real opportunity for experimentation. We got to plant so many new and interesting crops that I'd been reading about for years. I always think like about Gaia's Garden as a really formative text as well as edible forest gardens.
And I had no place to play with all these plants I was reading about, but we were doing intensive vegetable production, but then there was all this other space to develop the site. And we started planting all kinds of things like goumis and figs and aronias and serviceberries and Asian pears and pawpaws.
And there was just a huge opportunity for growth and feedback and for me to see what does well, what doesn't. And then also around that time / I was able to purchase a small 5,000 square foot lot where I live now, and just the opportunity to have my own home and start planting things and figuring it out myself, was a huge learning opportunity. So that's a little bit of that story.
Susan: That's great to have the space. It's like with me, with the park, we've got a backyard, but the park is the playground. But we are, unfortunately, it's a public space. We're limited as to what we can do. We always have to ask permission. And, we were actually told, I think / last year, no more trees. No more trees. Too many trees. I know. So it's okay, what shrubs can we plant now? Okay. So yeah.
So here you are. You started at this point, foodscaping. What were the main obstacles that you faced when you were building up your business as a foodscaper?
Oh, wow.
Matt: I think there were so many traditional challenges, which is like, how do I find clients?
How do I make money? How do I / do the accounting? And some of the more just traditional struggles, but one of the really big ones for me was plant sourcing. And for those who are used to looking at plant catalogs this time of year and then going to their favorite nursery, which for me have always been online, I've always ordered my plants online because all the plants that I've been reading about are usually only available online, which would be like funky fruits, perennial vegetables, things like that.
But then as soon as you want to plant these things for clients, it's really hard because getting these in larger quantities can be challenging. And the other big challenge is size. So many of the plants that come in the mail are incredibly small and they come bare root. And so then how, if you are getting like all your plants in a three month shipping period and they all come bare root and you gotta unpack them all and then, well, when are you gonna plant them for everybody?
So that was a really big challenge early on is figuring out, okay, /this whole I need potted plants I need and I need decent sized potted plants. Because a lot of folks, / there's just an expectation that the plants you plant are gonna look like the ones that people can get at the local nursery down the street.
They wanna see a six foot tall tree and a multi stemmed branch shrub that's two or three feet tall, at least a lot of times. And that was a huge challenge, just overcoming that, communicating what was possible with clients. And ultimately we had to set expectations for the first few years.
And then we have been slowly growing things out ourselves and buying things small, growing them out and also working with different suppliers to get bigger plants.
Susan: Fantastic. So /
Matt: we've made some strides with that.
Susan: That is so exciting though.
I must say, I am such a proponent of fruit tree whips. I love working with young trees and shaping them as I go. But yeah, I totally understand the limitation. How many can you actually, if you're planting these young whips, people will be like, there's hardly anything there. I paid you that much money for one little stick in the ground. Forget it.
Yeah.
Susan: let's see. We've got an email from Russ. Let's see if it says where Russ is from. okay. Hello. A couple of things. One, read Edible Landscaping in HOAs. While this article focuses on the right to convert lawn into native plants, it nevertheless has some / applicability to converting lawns into edible landscapes with HOAs.
And then there's a link from the New York Times and the story is called Native Plants, Lawns, Homeowners. Okay. The story is about They Fought the Lawn. And the Lawn's Done. You know that article?
Matt: Yes. I was lucky enough to get that sent to me by a few of our clients who are really into this whole movement.
And it's interesting. So we've done a lot of what I would call, like beautiful posts on our social media over the years of gardens and of fruits and of vegetables. And / we've gotten some nice feedback on some of them. We put a picture up this summer of three houses, and the house that we had worked on was in the middle and all we had done is just put cardboard and mulch down over every last square inch of the yard because we were gonna come back in a few months and plant it, which is one of the techniques we use sometimes.
And that picture alone got more comments and more attention than any post in our five year history. And there wasn't anything but just a bunch of mulch in somebody's lawn.
Susan: So what were people, so there's something really
Matt: interesting with this killing your lawn thing.
Susan: When you say attention, it was negative attention, it was criticism.
Matt: Some of it was negative. A lot of it was positive. Yeah. It was interesting that, but it, something happened on Facebook where it was a lot of negative comments like, keep that junk in your backyard. / Mostly it was positive and Instagram was purely positive.
Susan: Wow. So interesting. Okay, so more to come from Russ. Then Russ says, and of course there's Edible Landscaping utilizing Native Plants, which was the topic of Susan's interview with me, January 2017. Then Russ puts the link on podcastaddict.com for that episode. Anybody who wants to listen to previous episodes can go to orchard people.com/podcasts, and then you'll find the interview.
/ Fantastic. Okay, great Email and we've got one more here from David. Hi Susan. Fantastic show today. Very interesting. This is good. Your guest sounds like the actor Rob Morrow when he was on the TV show, Northern Exposure. In fact, if you didn't know any better, you would think he was Rob. Love You in Miami, Florida.
Have you ever heard that before?
Matt: No. I'm gonna have to look that one up. Rob Morrow, huh?
Susan: Yeah. Rob Morrow. TV show Northern Exposure. Okay, David, we'll check that out. That sounds great. And, you know what, if you ever wanna retire from foodscaping, you can go into acting, right? Yeah. With a great voice like that.
Okay. So, back to the idea of foodscaping.
[00:19:33] The Foodscaper Summit and Community Building
Susan: Now you've got this summit coming up and one of your passions is training other foodscapers. How did that come about?
Matt: I am an educator at heart. That's really what my biggest passion is. And I feel like I've always worked on educational farms and been in educator roles.
I think that in this particular case, there was so much for me to learn and there was so much for us as a movement to learn before we could turn the lens on what we were doing and start to educate people. And so once we got a little bit down the road with Custom Foodscaping, I feel like we'd made a lot of mistakes and we were able to start sharing those mistakes with other people as well as really highlight a lot of the mentors that we found along the way.
And as we got into this, Susan, we found that there were companies who are over 10 years old doing this, and we were able to network with them. And people in foodscaping are so willing to just share and be authentic and they want to connect with other people doing this work. And there was a huge hunger for all of us foodscapers to come together and support each other.
Just every profession needs that. And this one needs it, especially because everybody's on an island. You're the only company likely in your city, so you have nobody locally to network with. So that's where the Internet is so powerful. And we started the Foodscapers Summit and we started the Foodscaper just to start saying, Hey, let's share information, let's share resources, let's put on our, an educational summit so we can share our classes all together.
And we had an awesome response last year. So that was just so encouraging that people are hungry for this information. And now we get to think about a lot of our work with Custom Foodscaping from a lens of, okay, mistakes made, now we can share this. Or what are the lessons learned? And we have a forum to make the same request of other foodscapers and say, highlight some of your amazing projects.
Like what is your advice to newbie foodscapers? What are your favorite plants that your clients have loved that you haven't experienced a lot of pests and disease pressure. So it's coming together of people who are really doing this for clients for a living, which is the unique part of all this.
That makes me really excited because if we can make a living doing this, we can really grow the amount of edible ecological foodscapes that are out there, more so than all the amazing gardeners that are out there.
Susan: Oh, fantastic. That is so exciting. Now I have some comments that I got from Facebook, but before I go to them, what is the URL?
Where can people go to find out about the Food Scap Summit? If they're listening right now,
Matt: I would say just go to the foodscaper.com.
Susan: There you go. Very easy.
[00:22:51] Community Connections: The Common Orchard Project, Giving Grove
Susan: Okay, let's do a couple of Facebook comments, conversation in Facebook. Chris from Cincinnati writes, I do this i.e. foodscaping in Cincinnati, though I do so in the form of a nonprofit I run called The Common Orchard Project, which is different than Matt's Custom Foodscaping.
Matt and I met first at Grant Schultz's Farm Scale Permaculture course in Iowa, and I shortly formalized the nonprofit after visiting him in St. Louis, where he facilitated a connection for me with Giving Grove. It's a small and beautiful world, says Chris. That was very sweet. And then Giving Grove also had a comment and I researched a little bit about Giving Grove.
Very interesting organization. So Giving Grove creates and manages hundreds of community orchards intensities across the US with the help of more than 700 volunteer orchard stewards. And they add dozens of new orchards every year. And here's what they write. Helping communities grow fruit trees is our passion and our job. / All of our staff just read your book, Susan. We love how approachable you make urban orcharding. So I wanna thank you to the Giving Grove team for that, that little compliment. That was very nice and I'm really glad that my books have been able to help you guys and other growers.
And one more comment. We've got, this was an interesting one, Joanne from Ottawa, from Facebook. My plan years ago was to grow fruit in my yard for sale to a few local independent restaurants in my neighborhood in Ottawa, Ontario. I spoke with the owner chef about it and his reaction was most positive. That was in 2008 and several unexpected changes occurred that led me to move to / a different home.
So I could never execute the plan, but my goal was to grow species and cultivars that are hardy for my area and not commercially available in the restaurant trade. So that sounds very much like what you were saying, Matt.
Matt: Yeah. It's an interesting hybrid of the homegrown, but for sale to a restaurant.
Susan: Yeah, for a restaurant that doesn't have their own space. But they could have people. It's a great idea, isn't it?
You have, let's, yeah, that's great.
Susan: We've got, an email here from Tina. Hi Susan. Oh my goodness. That emailer is right. That guest does sound like a, the actor Rob Morrow, he played the character Dr. Joel Fleischman on that TV series. It was a great show based in the fictional city of Sicily, Alaska. Oh my gosh. So even Tina says so, you gotta check out the show. I must. Email me and tell me if you think, if you see if it resonates.
Okay.
[00:25:50] Perennial Fruits and Vegetables in Foodscaping
Susan: So we have so much more to talk about, / and I want to talk about some of your favorite foodscaping plants, some really interesting ones that you've commented on.
So let's do that.
So Matt, in the conference you're gonna be talking about easy to integrate perennial fruits and vegetables.
Now, why are these fruits and vegetables the backbone of any foodscaping design? / Perennial fruits and vegetables.
Matt: Because those are the ones that come back every year and I just feel so passionately that, /as we get older every year and we want to be out gardening, that we should make life easier on ourselves and do more of the harvest and less of the digging. And by focusing on perennials, that's exactly what we do. Of course, you being so focused on fruit trees, you know all about that. You plant it once and it gets bigger and more productive each year and you only have to dig that hole the one time.
Whereas with vegetables that are annuals to a certain degree, you have to start over each year. And so in that talk, I'm gonna be talking about a lot of smaller space plants like blackberries and raspberries and strawberries and things that can be quite tidy and integrated around the vegetable garden, in the way that maybe an espalier fruit tree can be integrated.
Whereas an orchard is separate and it's another component of the landscape. But things like all those berries and different perennial vegetables, things like asparagus and sea kale and sorrel, these are things that integrate really well in and around the vegetable garden itself.
Susan: Beautiful. Yes, of course.
[00:27:45] Unusual and Hard-to-Find Plants
Susan: Now here we've got an email here from Dave, from Medford, Massachusetts. Good afternoon. Great show. Susan and Matt, I'm interested in growing unusual or hard to find foods for my area, Massachusetts Zone five B. I was happy to hear you refer to mulberry as I've got a red mulberry tree set to arrive in spring, but could you recommend any other plants that you've been successful with? I've got a relatively small yard and want to make every inch count. Thank you. So that's from Dave.
Matt: That's a great question. I would say that mulberry / is indeed a great place to start. Other compact, big winners I would say are serviceberries. Pie cherry, specifically the pie cherry, not the sweet cherry because there's a lot of great dwarf varieties like North Star and Meteor and Carmine Jewel if you're looking in the pie cherry world.
And then I would say in terms of trees, we love pawpaws, which are native that I'm sure you've talked about before, which can be kept quite compact. And / those are nice for urban context. So I would say start there. And I imagine, Susan, you'll also be sharing that recommended foodscaping plants document.
Susan: Absolutely. So I'm going to put it on the show notes for this episode. So if people come back and find the episode at podcast.orchardpeople.com, they just click into the more information and they'll be able to download it. But tell us about it. What is in that document?
Matt: So it's basically a compilation of all of our favorite plants that we offer to our clients.
So it includes trees, shrubs, and perennials. And it's really a breakdown of two different things. It's common fruits / where we list the more pest and disease resistant varieties. So we might list things like apples but we would specify, hey, here are some of the more easy to grow apple varieties 'cause that's really a focus for us. As well as a lot of uncommon fruits like that Gerardi dwarf mulberry that I mentioned, or the goumi bush, which we really like. A lot of things that are fast growing, easy to grow, don't have a lot of pest and disease issues.
Susan: Okay, so I love that list. Beautiful list and something jumped out at me. You've got to tell me about this Matt.
[00:30:28] Trifoliate Orange: A Unique Foodscaping Plant
Susan: Trifoliate orange Flying Dragon, that is the name of a shrub in your list. Tell me about it. What a name. Yes.
Matt: It's so fun. Yeah. It always catches people's attention. So trifoliate orange is a plant that is a hardy citrus, and the Flying Dragon is the varietal name.
/So the reason that the trifoliate orange Flying Dragon is what we recommend is because it's much more compact, it's more of a shrub, whereas regular trifoliate orange can get really quite big. And so the amazing thing about this is that it is cold hardy, definitely cold hardy here in zone six. I would imagine it is marginally hardy in zone five as well.
And it is a funky, contorted, orange-producing plant that is unlike anything we can grow in our landscape. So it has all these ornamental qualities. However, the reason you don't know about it is because the fruit quality is quite low. It is a small, super sour, super seedy orange. So / it has some breeding work that still is left to be desired here, but as a foodscaping plant, meaning a plant that looks cool, doesn't have pest and disease issues and makes food, it's the only citrus we can grow. We adore it.
Susan: So what, how would you, do you eat it or do you just say, okay, it looks pretty and it is a great story to tell to my friends.
Yeah.
Matt: Mostly we juice it and it is quite productive. On a single trifoliate orange bush, you could get dozens and dozens of these fruits, and they're small but they're not tiny. They're, maybe for those who know, like racket ball size, definitely golf ball size, and you cut 'em in half and you squeeze the juice out.
And then you've got all this homegrown citrus juice which, for us, we use in our water or in salad dressing or squeeze it on top of some meat if we're having that for a meal just to add that citrus zest. And you can also zest the skin as well. You can use the remains of the skin to make other cleaning products like you might with other citrus relatives.
So / it is versatile. It definitely takes way more work than if you're just to go to the store and buy lemons or oranges.
Susan: I like it. It makes you a little bit more independent. / I love the idea of using it in a salad dressing. What a great idea.
You're gonna love this next email. Here it is. It's from Tammy. Tammy writes, hi Susan. Dr. Fleischmann's advice is very interesting. This is relating to the character that the TV show character that you apparently sound like. So Dr. Fleischmann's advice is very interesting. Does the doctor have a book out on this topic? Thank you. Dr. Matt, /have you written any books?
Matt: I have not written any books. /Maybe that'll come down the road here. We're still learning a lot and, if people are interested in reading more, we do have a number of blog articles and videos and other ways of learning besides a book at this point. So I would say /head over to foodscaper.com and there's a whole myriad of educational resources there.
Susan: Okay. Hopefully that'll be good enough. Okay. We just talked about the trifoliate orange. Fascinating. And now another thing that jumped out at me from your list. Let's see.
[00:34:31] Persimmon Trees: American, Asian, and Hybrids
Susan: You also talked about the three different types of persimmon trees. And / tell me about the difference between American, Asian, and the hybrid ones and what these plants are good for.
Matt: Gosh, they're good for making dreams come true. / If you haven't had persimmon, they're absolutely delicious and maybe the sweetest fruit that we can grow in our part of the world.
So there are these three kinds. Primarily there's two kinds that people come into contact with. The American persimmon, which is our native persimmon, / native to North America. It's native to a huge area of North America. And these are taller trees. They can be 20 to 50 feet tall.
I feel like they're often viewed as like out in the woods or people forage for them. And unfortunately, because of that, so many people don't understand that there are improved grafted varieties of persimmon / where the persimmon are way bigger and way prettier sometimes, and way less seedy, sometimes even seedless.
There are many seedless American persimmon varieties / but they are larger trees. They can easily be managed at 20 to 30 feet, but they wanna be a taller tree. And so, they're not very compact.
Now, on the other hand, the Asian persimmon is incredibly common throughout a huge part of the world and they're five star edible landscaping plants, meaning they're beautiful, big, glossy leaves, almost no pest and disease issues, but they're only hardy to zone 7. So they're marginally hardy for me here in zone 6b. But everybody who's in the southern part of the US or anywhere in the Mediterranean climate, I would highly recommend Asian persimmon for their ease of care.
And they're also like the last fruit to produce in the year usually, so they really help round out the season. The hybrids are, there's only a handful of crosses that have been made between these Asian persimmon and these American persimmon, and some of them have imparted the cold hardiness of the American persimmon onto something that looks more like an Asian persson, which is much more compact.
The Asian persimmon are more like 10 to 20 feet tall, and they make, I would say, a much better fruit tree for an urban and suburban space. But a lot of us are probably in colder areas, in which case if you have a little bit more space, I highly encourage trying some of the grafted cultivar American persimmons.
And they're exquisite and they're like, they're just like baby food. They're so sweet and they have a smoky, burnt flavor to them a little bit and a wonderful texture.
Susan: Fantastic. Ooh, yummy. You're making me hungry. okay. And the other thing that jumped out at me. Oh, here, we've got another email.
This one's from Michael from Alaska. Hi Susan and Matt.
[00:37:47] Tips for Foodscaping in HOA Areas
Susan: Could you speak about any tips or tricks that you have to people who are venturing into foodscaping, while doing so, in a way that will create manicured results that won't get the attention of an HOA? Thanks for the show. That's from Michael. /
Matt: Yeah, I would say my big tip is that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, and you can slowly integrate fruit trees and shrubs into the landscape, and it doesn't need to be what we see a lot of times on social media or things that come across the Internet, which is like that New York Times article where it's rip out the whole yard, plant all native flowers.
Obviously that's going to call a lot of attention. If you want to just incorporate what I would call foundation plantings, meaning shrubs up against the house, those could easily be serviceberries or blueberries. Maybe out in the yard, there's what we call a foodscape island where it's maybe an oblong landscape shape with some edging around it.
And maybe you plant a pawpaw with some other native flowers like echinacea and black-eyed Susan around it. So these are familiar yet important native flowers. They look great and there's a fruit tree planted around them that's also native and doesn't suffer from many pests and disease issues.
I don't think anybody would really have a problem or even notice that. / That's where I would generally start.
Susan: That is such a good suggestion. Even if you are supposed to have a certain amount of grass, you are allowed to have your own ornamental plants.
And if they produce fruit, that's just a bonus. I think that's so smart. Trick them. That's what you have to do. Yeah, so the other thing that jumped out of your wonderful list, which we're gonna share at podcast.orchardpeople.com / and / they can download the list.
[00:39:56] Che: The Uncommon Chinese Fruit
Susan: So you mentioned something called che, CHE. Tell me about that. What is that?
Matt: So che is one that I will admittedly say I don't know a ton about. I haven't been growing it for that long, but I've had the privilege of eating a number of them over the years. Che is a super uncommon Chinese fruit that, to me, looks like a huge raspberry growing on a tree. And it is partly related to the mulberry and the fig. And it's a really interesting one. For whatever reason, I think it's because of its dwarfing effect, it's grafted onto Osage orange. So if you're familiar with Osage orange, the fruits actually look like miniature Osage oranges or miniature brains, and they taste like little watermelons that are encased.
We love them because they fit that criteria of mostly pest and disease resistant. They don't experience a lot of pest and disease problems at all. They have a uniquely sprawling nature to them, meaning like super open form like Japanese maples. You know how they're like really wide, che can do that.
I should say specifically the variety Seedless. That's the variety name of the che. There's only a few varietal names out there and that's the most common one. And it is another one that is probably only hardy to zone 6, or I should say the fruit needs a little bit longer of a year for it to ripen before the frost comes.
So it's probably better suited for those zone 7, zone 8, can be grown in zone 6 as well. And I think it could be grown in zone 5, but the fruit may not ripen in time.
Susan: Yeah, that's not fair for folks in the colder climates. That's a little frustrating for us. I know. But that's okay.
[00:41:57] Starting a Foodscaping Side Hustle
Susan: / Okay, / is there one thing you wanna say to the listeners about, let's say / we've got listeners who do love caring for their own garden. Maybe they want to expand into doing a little bit of work as a foodscaper.
What would you recommend to them? What would you say to them?
Matt: I would say, I think this works really well as a side hustle business because these are the kinds of things that people are already talking about with all their friends and relatives and neighbors. And if at least that's how I was, and I find so many other foodscapers.
So it's instead of people saying, Hey, can you help me with my garden? Your garden looks so great. You can be like, in fact, my, company is actually doing a little bit of this work now and I'm exploring where it goes and, hopefully, people can find opportunities and the flexibility within their life to add something like this in.
So maybe they can just start dipping their toes into it, but / it's a really great way to connect with your passions all the time. And if you're a real fruit tree nerd like me and you've run out of space in your own yard, but you really want to grow all these different varieties, what do you do?
Start convincing the people in your network that they need fruit trees too. And then you can expand your knowledge that way as well.
Susan: That's very smart. That's a great way for me to overcome the limitations of growing fruit trees in my local park.
[00:43:36] Holiday Wishes
Susan: Okay, /I just wanna say hello to some of the regular listeners who sent me emails this month. I love it when you guys reach out to me. So after last month's show on Hardy Apple Trees, I got emails from Donna, Jane, Tim, and Mason, who all wrote to say that they really loved the show on Hardy Apple Trees. So thank you guys.
I really love that show too. That was super interesting. And of course, it's holiday season and I heard from so many lovely listeners who just wanted to miss wish me and the team a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. And so thank you to Olivia, Kyle, Ken, Donna, Carl, William, Kelly, and Monica for sending me those lovely wishes for Happy Holidays.
And I wish all the listeners really wonderful holiday right now. A beautiful, fruitful new year in 2023 for all of us. That we should all be safe and have wonderful gardens with a lot of beautiful produce coming from them.
/ And thank you so very much to you, Matt, for coming on the show to share your passions with us. And thank you for sharing all the lessons that you learn as a foodscaper with others who want to develop that as a career.
/ That's a wonderful thing to do.
Matt: I so appreciate the opportunity and I'm so grateful for all the podcasts and all the knowledge that you've shared with me over the years, Susan.
Susan: Oh, I am so thank you. I'm blushing now, and I'm very happy to have you as a listener. That's so great.
Okay. Take care. Goodbye for now. I know you need to run off, so see you next time.
Matt: See you soon. Thanks again.
Susan: That's super.
[00:45:14] Conclusion and Resources
Susan: So thank you so much for, to Matt for coming on the show today. ah, wow, that was so inspiring. So if you as a listener wanna learn more about today's topic, all you have to do is go to orchard people.com/podcasts and by tomorrow I will have this document up that Matt shared with me with some of his top picks for plants to put in your garden that are wonderful foodscaping plants.
And if you wanna see what we're talking about today, I'm gonna put together a video in the next few days and I will put it on the Orchard People YouTube channel in the next couple of days. So you'll be able to see a short video version of this podcast with lots of images to bring it to life. That's at the Orchard People YouTube channel.
So that was Matt Lebon of custom foodscaping.com. That's all for the show today. And if you want to learn more about growing fruit trees, you can go to orchard people.com where I have lots of, information, lots of articles, podcasts, and premium courses on Fruit Tree care. We are gonna be back again next month in 2023, and we will dig into another great topic.
But for now, from me, Susan Poizner of orchard people.com, I look forward to seeing you again. Okay, take care. See you next month.